


There are moments when words don't reach

by Waistcoat35



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, M/M, Reincarnation, So much angst, Various Timelines, Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 19:39:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13173822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waistcoat35/pseuds/Waistcoat35
Summary: The story, in some ways, starts with a photo album. But in other ways, it really doesn’t – the album comes afterwards. After he remembers. It also forms the start, middle and bittersweet end of the tale, framing each part of their narrative in precise brushstrokes and grainy monochrome, blurry technicolour and precise clarity.





	There are moments when words don't reach

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smallredboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallredboy/gifts).



> This fic is dedicated to @imaginedeath  
> I hope you like it!

The story, in some ways, starts with a photo album. But in other ways, it really doesn’t – the album comes afterwards. After he remembers. It also forms the start, middle and bittersweet end of the tale, framing each part of their narrative in precise brushstrokes and grainy monochrome, blurry technicolour and precise clarity.

The first time Aaron comes back, they meet in 1904. Later on, in a later life, he will find it both fitting and absurdly morbid – to be reborn exactly a century after his biggest mistake. It runs almost like clockwork – Hamilton longs for a war and Burr is his guiding light. And after a decade, war is what they get. Hamilton is thrilled – Burr much less so. They are young, with fire in their blood and light in their eyes, and Hamilton rushes off to fight the first chance he gets.

Burr… doesn’t. He sits at home with his books and his maps, and he waits for letters, news, anything at all from Hamilton. Since they met, something about Hamilton has seemed _familiar_. The bright orphan boy born out of wedlock, who shook his hand so eagerly that first time, so readily. Something tells Burr he should follow him wherever he goes, and some stronger, deeper part of him forces him to wait. He comes across a picture in a history book, an artist’s impression of a duel. For reasons he cannot fathom, he keeps it in his wallet. And he waits for Hamilton.

Burr waits, and when news comes in it isn’t good. Hamilton’s been shot in the side – he’s alive (barely) but it’ll take time for him to recover. So he sits, and he writes, and he waits some more. Eventually, Hamilton comes home – and when he does, he scarcely stays before he’s healed up and off _again_ – back into the mouth of the dragon. He leaves in the middle of the night, and Burr catches him right before he slips out of the front door. He tries to reason with the man – begs, _pleads_. But Hamilton insists on taking his stand. And when he does, there is a pain in Aaron’s skull.

_“If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”_

He lets him go. He sits at his desk. He waits a few hours, then he cries a few more, for a reason he isn’t so sure is sorrow. More like anger – anger at himself. And then? Burr follows him. He leaves his books, abandons his maps – the only thing he takes with him is his wallet, stuffed with pairs of movie ticket stubs and scribbles notes from Hamilton and that damned duel picture.

It is only as he sees Hamilton’s face one last time, flares lighting his bloody face in a muddy trench, the light of war rising in his eyes, that he remembers the revolution. He killed Hamilton – and he thinks, as the world explodes around them and their hands intertwine, that now Hamilton has killed him.

* * *

 

The next time, Burr is a museum curator in New York. He has a partner and a child and he is happy. He is _happy_. But he feels like something (some _one_ ) is missing.

It takes a new project where he’s sorting through soldier’s belongings to figure out what. He picks things out, packages them up, stores and archives and files and makes displays. And then, when he gets to the last box, the first thing he pulls out is a wallet.

It isn’t any different from the last fifty wallets he’s unpacked, on the outside. But it’s heavy and bulky and scraps of paper covered in mud are poking out – so Burr opens it. Out spill a plethora of notes – scraps of paper and receipts covered in inky scrawl, always by the exact same hand. Nickleodeon tickets for films that are now twenty, thirty years old. And deep in the leather lining, tucked against a seam, there is a grainy drawing taken from a history textbook. Two men, two guns, two hearts – one beating, one not.

He checks for details, and finds two names. One is written neatly on a label stuck to the opening flap, with an address and contact details. The other one is scrawled directly underneath, extra-small to fit into the little space provided. The names, those are somewhat familiar. He goes through a directory of names and files and objects, and finally he finds the record he needs – a photograph of two men, grainy and black-and-white but still clear enough to see one’s reserved smile, the other’s cocky grin. 

The former is like a memory from yesterday, and that’s probably because it was _him_ , once upon a time. The latter is a complete stranger, and yet an old friend. If Aaron sits tight and waits, if he stays at home with his archives and his letters and his small but serviceable family, maybe Alexander will come to him. But he learned from waiting last time. There’s a war brewing overseas, and this time he is going to join it and go to Alexander. (Against protocol or not, the wallet is taken and emptied and it’s contents are stuffed into an album, the drawing going first and the rest following after.)

Theodosia is angry, of course. He expects her to be angry. But then again, last time he waited and she died and their daughter ended up at the bottom of the sea and he ended up with nothing. Burr’s beginning to feel that it is, perhaps, beneficial to him if he keeps moving.

He’s right, of course – not a week later, he’s already found him again. Where better to look for Alexander Hamilton than the height of a heated battle? This time it’s him who goes after Alexander, and they clash and argue and disagree, but the important thing is that he’s _there_ , he’s there where Burr can keep an eye on him and stop him from getting himself into more messes.

(Later on, in the midst of enemy fire with Alexander choking and dying in his arms, a nasty little voice asks Burr if he’s trying to help Alexander or sabotage him – after all, it’s only after Aaron shows up that things go so horribly wrong.)

That time, Aaron Burr survived after Alexander Hamilton. He held him all night until his flame died out, and he went home and got divorced and his little girl was killed in an accident. It seems that Aaron will tear both his and Alexander’s lives apart in his insistence to stay near the other man. His instinct to protect is the same instinct that destroys them.

* * *

 

The last time… things go differently. This time they’re perhaps the youngest they’ve ever been – they’re in college together, and they share a dorm. That is unexpected, and extremely cruel. This time, Aaron had resolved to stay away. If anything, he’d actually avoided Alex. And here they were, forced together by fate instead of either of their wills. A hellish sort of destiny, indeed. 

Aaron is reserved and quiet, his words clipped and his expressions cold. Alex tries to befriend him nonetheless – but this is for the other boy’s own good, after all. Aaron doesn’t look at the album now – it always finds him again, but he can’t bring himself to face the thing because the more he looks at the pictures the more he wants to run to him and pull him close and protect him from all of the bad, bad things that Aaron himself has seen happen to good men. That’s what Alex is at the end of the day – a good man, painfully good, even when he himself can’t (or won’t) see it and neither can anybody else.

He’s taught Aaron not to wait, not to doubt, to go after what he wants but not to be careless with other people because you don’t always know what you have until it’s gone. And that’s why he’s being careful now – so, so careful. Alex doesn’t know their history, may never know, and Aaron wants it to stay that way because he doesn’t quite know if he could ever handle Alex seeing him as a monster.

Especially not now – not now that he finds himself slowly falling in love with this man, this ridiculous wonderful man who just wants to make things better in his own whirlwind way, whose eyes dance as though in candelight and dim as though in rain. This man who almost _exists_ to write and for nothing else. (And isn’t it sad that he exists to serve millions of people while Aaron exists to protect only one.)

But it doesn’t work, anyway. Eventually – through something that’s probably not his fault, not Aaron’s fault, not the fault of anybody except for some sadistic higher power – Alex remembers all on his own. The stare he gives Aaron tells him everything, and he doesn’t even need to ask what’s wrong before he’s reaching out and Alex is running, running, running away.

A few hours later, Alex is huddled on his dorm bed in one of Aaron’s hoodies, jumping at every bump and bang and shout outside on the campus. He curls into a tighter and tighter ball as he remembers arguing, letters, a shot and a screaming pain all along his body. He whimpers.

He flinches, then, as Burr sits at the foot of the bed. He doesn’t press or come closer – for the first time in a long, long time, Aaron just waits. Alex slowly uncurls, and they look at the album together – Aaron giving commentary on every page. Alex first watches from a distance like a wary alley cat, before inching closer and closer and somehow eventually ending up with his head in Aaron’s lap, Aaron’s hand in his hair as though it was always meant to be there.

Fate may throw them apart and string them back together again, but Aaron Burr has lived and died and fought for Alex, and now his debt is repaid. From here onwards, anything more he does is of his own free will – which is perhaps why he catches Alex’s lips with his own in a brief declaration of something greater than independence – rather, it’s opposite. The ability to depend on another so freely and trustingly as to place your very soul in their hands and expect them not to drop it.

 


End file.
